Status

Opinion

Sounds a good mult-purpose tag with many applications and can easily be removed if the thing comes back to life. MikeCollinson 17:43, 7 June 2007 (BST)

Would this deprecate railway=disused? Andrewpmk 21:57, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

If this proposal gets through to the map features page, then someone could make a separate proposal to change the tagging of railway=disused to railway=*/disused=yes, but I don't want this proposal to be bogged down by railway issues. Whether people want to keep using railway=disused or not shouldn't influence the tagging of all other things were this is useful. --Cartinus 01:48, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

In railways, disused is different from abandoned (disused = infrastructure is still on its place). Should we keep this distinction and propose new abandoned=yes tag? --Jttt 11:19, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Does it apply to hospital?

Resolved: Yes, disused=yes has always applied to any tag. In it's original form, you shouldn't have, though. The schema has since been updated to recommend tags which no longer generate inconsistencies. --achadwick 18:32, 5 June 2011 (BST)

In my area there exists a hospital that no longer is in use. Is it advisable to map it as amenity=hospital together with disused=yes? Routing softwares etc. shouldn't lead people who are looking for hospitals there. --Erik Lundin 23:30, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I urge not using this tag. Since the hospital is rendered as a hospital (with basically no hope of that ever changing), and since this tagging scheme is unfriendly to data consumers like routing software, I would expect hospitals decorated with disused=yes to be findable by routing software. Don't use this; it's a bad tagging scheme. --achadwick 21:47, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

To update myself, I've updated the main page with an extension and some recommendations which now generate tag-sets without inconsistencies. Far better, IMO. --achadwick 18:32, 5 June 2011 (BST)

Move to deprecate

Okay, let's deprecate this tag already. I've just been misled by a disused station tagged according to this scheme which doesn't even exist on the ground, looking at the Bing imagery. I'll admit it; my initial enthusiasm for this way of working was wrong. The devs, quite correctly, are never going to implement this[1][2]. They're correct because it's a backwards-incompatible nightmare. If the information needs to be retained, it would be much better manners to data consumers to suffix the "main type" key with :former, prefix it with disused: or whatever. Anything that isn't one of the exact strings matched by our rendering rules, basically. Any seconds? --21:44, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

For demolished it does, without a doubt. A demolished what-ever is no longer that what-ever; it doesn't look like it, nor does it function like it. For abandoned, there's a subtle difference between physical structures and their function: an abandoned building is still a building, but the amenity/shop within is no longer an amenity/shop. Abandoned might thus convey something interesting about the physical structure, but such features should not have any tags that imply a "feature by use". Alv 12:13, 4 June 2011 (BST)

I'm working on drinking_water taps. Some of them are broken. Ideally they'd still be in OpenStreetMap in some manner, but should either show up differently in the rendering or be dropped. Thoughts? Brycenesbitt

Demote tags into a disused: namespace

I've had the time to do something about [the above problems] on the main page. Let me know what you think. Out of "deference" to the nonsense wiki voting, I've retained the disused=yes since it captures the general concept of "this object is a disused thing", but also decided that it establishes a namespace, and that tags that might otherwise be confusing to renderers and are no longer relevant or no longer in use can be demoted into that to prevent them rendering or misleading people. It's pretty close to what I do already. I've added sections about nobbling tags that would otherwise be confusing, and shown people what to do to get things back into a sensible state.

Well it makes sense to me. You've added good clear description on there too.

Normally I'm against the introduction of new "namespaces" (A.K.A. overly complicated tagging schemes involving colon characters) however in this case I imagine it could work well as a way of shunting the incorrect tags out of the way.

The comparison page didn't contain that exact syntax, but it did contain "<key>-<status> = <value>", which is equivalent except for small syntactic differences. I've changed that section accordingly. Pros/cons still apply.

By the way, I don't quite agree with achadwick's edits to <status> = yes. Of course most of disadvantages of that idea no longer apply if "a namespace-based approach is used". But that's because you are actually using a completely different idea (the one formerly documented as "<key>-<status> = <value>") and just keep the disused=yes around as some kind of redundant historic relic. --Tordanik 19:10, 14 June 2011 (BST)

Okay, refactored Comparison of life cycle concepts a bit, and moved the offending discussion of namespacing to the newly titled section. Regarding disused=* - like I say, I'm just trying to rehabilitate the description here to help mappers who read it tag more correctly. It may be that disused=yes has no real purpose after everyone fixes their data ☺ but actually I quite like being able to say that an object is "a building (building=yes); that's no longer used for anything (disused=yes); and it was a pizza parlour before it fell into disuse (disused:amenity=restaurant & disused:cuisine=pizza)". Since OSM namespaces don't imply a "yes" value for the parent key - see service=*, particularly the recent namespaced additions to it! - I think you have to state a "yes" value for disused=* too. --achadwick 16:02, 15 June 2011 (BST)

Right then... who wants to apply this to ruins=*? ☠ --achadwick 16:02, 15 June 2011 (BST)

I do : ruined=* . However, someone suggested to better re-use the "abandoned:tag=value" schema and add a ruins=yes. Arguably, a ruined feature is most likely abandoned as well... but I am unsure which way is better. I just think that building=yes + ruins=yes is a bad idea, just for the same reasons building=yes + disused/abandoned=yes is a bad idea sletuffe (talk) 13:50, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Namespace-centric rewrite

Just did some page cleanup trying to convey that this should be treated as a namespace (ugly, but unambiguous and flexible) rather than a simple tag, and trying to clarify that the disused=yes value is especially suspect. Hope the edits make sense. IMO the examples of good usage need to be towards the front of the article, separated from discussion of the older deprecated and discouraged schemes. Let's set a good example first, and then expose the dirty historical laundry.

Rather than saying "don't use this tag", I think we should be saying "don't use this as a tag, use it as a namespace". But I'm cool with deprecating the disused=yes value: this will allow mappers to find old muddled data [and] clean it up.

Makes sense. I have make some more tweeks to the page along the lines you have been developing. PeterIto (talk) 13:09, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Best to add a {{Translation out of sync}} health warning to the other language versions, preferably with a link to this discussion in the change comment or talk page.--Andrew (talk) 13:21, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Rename to "key:disused:" ?

It should be used as namespace now, wondering if it would make sense to rename the page to "key:disused:" to reflect that? Do we have some better methods to create wiki-pages for namespaces? RicoZ (talk) 13:43, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't know of any better methods. See also other prefixes such as Key:addr --Tordanik 12:26, 21 December 2014 (UTC)